Question

I’m creating a website using the cakePHP framework and I and a newbie to php and web programming. I want to do something similar to Digg’s submit button, where you type a url and it fetches an image, title and sometimes a short description of the article on the webpage. I’m assuming this would be done using php but I’m open to any method.

Answer 1

You’ll need to do a few simple things:

1. You’ll need to use the curl functions of PHP to get the source for the webpage. The php.net site provides a great example of this.

2. From that source, you’ll need to find the title of the page, and any images. The easiest way would probably be through a simple regular expression.

Here’s a simple script example which does both:

<?php 
$ch = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "stackoverflow.com"); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
$output = curl_exec($ch); 
curl_close($ch);

$titles = array();
preg_match_all("/<title>(.*)<\/title>/im", $output, &$titles, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

$images = array();
preg_match_all("/<img *src= *['\"](.*)['\"](.*)\/*>/iU", $output, &$images, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

$page_title = $titles[1][0];
$images_found = $images[1];

echo "Page title was: {$page_title}\n";
foreach($images_found as $image_src) echo "Image: {$image_src}\n";
?>

The regular expressions I included are imperfect, and won’t catch all titles or all images in every case, but they’re both good starts.

You’ll also need to pick which image you want to use from the array $images. You can do this randomly, or based on the largest image on the page, or the first one you find, etc.